that second, the tree once more sank into the ordinary ranks of trees,
and she was able to seat herself in its shade and to pick the red
flowers with the thin green leaves which were growing beneath it. She
laid them side by side, flower to flower and stalk to stalk, caressing
them for walking alone. Flowers and even pebbles in the earth had their
own life and disposition, and brought back the feelings of a child to
whom they were companions. Looking up, her eye was caught by the line of
the mountains flying out energetically across the sky like the lash of
a curling whip. She looked at the pale distant sky, and the high bare
places on the mountain-tops lying exposed to the sun. When she sat
down she had dropped her books on to the earth at her feet, and now she
looked down on them lying there, so square in the grass, a tall stem
bending over and tickling the smooth brown cover of Gibbon, while the
mottled blue Balzac lay naked in the sun. With a feeling that to open
and read would certainly be a surprising experience, she turned the
historian's page and read that--

His generals, in the early part of his reign, attempted the reduction
of Aethiopia and Arabia Felix. They marched near a thousand miles to
the south of the tropic; but the heat of the climate soon repelled
the invaders and protected the unwarlike natives of those sequestered
regions. . . . The northern countries of Europe scarcely deserved the
expense and labour of conquest. The forests and morasses of Germany were
filled with a hardy race of barbarians, who despised life when it was
separated from freedom.

Never had any words been so vivid and so beautiful--Arabia
Felix--Aethiopia. But those were not more noble than the others, hardy
barbarians, forests, and morasses. They seemed to drive roads back to
the very beginning of the world, on either side of which the populations
of all times and countries stood in avenues, and by passing down them
all knowledge would be hers, and the book of the world turned back to
the very first page. Such was her excitement at the possibilities of
knowledge now opening before her that she ceased to read, and a breeze
turning the page, the covers of Gibbon gently ruffled and closed
together. She then rose again and walked on. Slowly her mind became less
confused and sought the origins of her exaltation, which were twofold
and could be limited by an effort to the persons of Mr. Hirst and Mr.
Hewet. Any clear analysis of